Illustrative Demonstrators march in support of Palestinians, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, U.S., February 5, 2025. Photo: David Ryder via Reuters Connect.

A pro-Hamas student group calling itself “Super UW” commandeered University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary Engineering Building (IEB) on Monday night and refused to leave unless school officials accede to its demand that the institution’s partnerships with The Boeing Company be terminated, whose armaments manufacturing they identified as a resource aiding Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas from Gaza.

“We are taking this building amidst the current and renewed wave of the student intifada, following the uprising of student action for Palestine after the heroic victory of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th,” the group said in a manifesto. “The University of Washington is a direct partner in the genocide of the Palestinian people through its allegiance to its partnership with Boeing. Boeing manufactures the F-15 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, Hellfire missiles, and 500 pound bombs which israel [sic] uses to murder entire Palestinian families and destroy Palestinian homes, schools, and mosques.”

University of Washington and Boeing have what the school describes as a “long-standing partnership” for the research and development of aerospace technology.

“The UW is committed to maintaining a secure learning and research environment, and strongly condemns this illegal building occupation and the antisemitic statement that was issued by a suspended student group on Monday,” university assistant vice president for communications said in a statement, issued on Monday, which addressed the occupation of the IEB. “The university will not be intimidated by this sort of offensive and destructive behavior and all continue to oppose antisemitism in all its forms.”

The illegal demonstration involved students establishing blockades near the building using “bike rack[s] and chairs,” burned trash — setting off sizable fires — that they then left unattended.

Law enforcement officers eventually entered the building equipped with riot gear, including helmets and batons, and proceeded to arrest over two dozen protesters.

About 30 individuals who occupied the building were arrested and charges of trespassing, property destruction, and disorderly conduct, and conspiracy to commit all three, according to law enforcement.

University of Washington is not the first school to quell an attempt to establish a pro-Hamas encampment this semester. Swarthmore College did so on Saturday, securing the arrest of nine students and non-students who spearheaded the effort.

According to The Phoenix, Swarthmore College’s independent campus newspaper, the encampment was stationed by Students for Justice in Palestine, a campus group which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, on last Wednesday evening in an attempt to “revive” similar demonstrations staged last year. Naming the encampment the “Hossam Shabat Liberated Zone,” SJP called on its supporters to “escalate” and establish a “site of colonial resistence” [sic] from which to demand divestment from companies holding economic ties to Israel.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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Alfred Dreyfus. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A group of French lawmakers on Tuesday put forward a proposal to promote Alfred Dreyfus — a Jewish army captain wrongly convicted of espionage in the late 19th century — to the rank of brigadier general, more than a century after his death.

Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who is leading the initiative, said the law would “constitute an act of reparation, a recognition of [Dreyfus’s] merits, and a tribute to his republican commitment,” in an effort to rectify the wrongful conviction, which unfolded amid widespread antisemitism across the country at the time.

“Five years of exile and humiliation irreparably harmed his military career,” Attal said. “It is undeniable that, had it not been for this injustice, Alfred Dreyfus would have naturally ascended to the highest ranks.”

According to Attal, the proposed legislation would also signal that the fight against antisemitism remains urgent, as France has seen a rise in antisemitic hate crimes following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.

“The antisemitism that targeted Alfred Dreyfus is not in the distant past,” Attal said in a draft proposal set to be presented to the French parliament. “Today’s acts of hatred remind us that the fight is still ongoing.”

There is no set date yet for a vote on the proposal.

In 1894, Dreyfus, a 36-year-old army captain from the Alsace region in northeastern France, was accused of leaking secret information to a German military official and was put on trial amid a fierce antisemitic media campaign.

Despite the lack of evidence, Dreyfus was convicted of treason based on a handwriting comparison with a document found in a German official’s wastepaper basket in Paris, sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, and stripped of his military rank.

Years later, French Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, then head of military intelligence, secretly reopened the case and uncovered that the handwriting on the incriminating document belonged to another officer. But when he brought this evidence to the army’s general staff, Picquart was dismissed from his post and imprisoned for a year.

In 1899, Dreyfus was brought back to France for a second trial, where he was again found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison, before ultimately receiving a pardon — though the charges against him were not formally overturned.

It was seven years later, in 1906, when Dreyfus was officially exonerated after the French High Court of Appeal overturned the original verdict and reinstated him with the rank of major.

He lived until 1935, dying at the age of 76.

France is home to the largest Jewish population after Israel and the United States, as well as the largest Muslim community in the European Union.

Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) – the main representative body of French Jews.

The total number of antisemitic outrages in 2024 was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.

In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.

The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.

One such incident occurred in June, when a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a Paris suburb. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack.

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Demonstrators take their “Emergency Rally: Stand with Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza” out of Harvard University and onto the streets of Harvard Square, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct.14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Most American Jews agree on one thing — antisemitism is on the rise in this country, and the curve is rather steep, especially since October 7, 2023. To many, it is shocking that this is happening in America, the one-time safe haven for Jews.

Antisemitism was present in the US even during World War II, though the discovery of Nazi atrocities in concentration camps diminished it substantially. Even antisemites felt uncomfortable, at least for a while. However, many universities did not abolish quotas for Jewish students until the 1960s. Broad US support for Israel didn’t emerge until the 1970s — and there still remained many instances of antisemitism throughout the US.

But something strange started happening after 9/11. There were voices blaming Jews for the Al-Qaeda attacks, and many Muslims were worried about backlash. This view — that Jews were responsible for the ills in America and the Middle East was developing at some universities long before 9/11. Professors in Middle East Studies departments, like Edward Said at Columbia, began blaming Israel for problems in America and around the world. Said and his ilk present Israelis as war criminals, ignoring all history of the region, broad support for terrorism against Israel, and the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to leave peacefully alongside their Jewish neighbors.

Due to this campus indoctrination, as well as successful far-left activism, the seeds of hatred had been firmly planted against Israel.

This disturbing trend took an ominous turn on October 7, when even during the massacre, many of those professors and their students rejoiced over it.

Since then, many universities have been engulfed in raucous and violent protests descending into chaos and rabid antisemitism, including calling for the destruction of Israel. It has also resulted in the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students. Of the recent Hamas-Israel conflicts, this current war is the longest and most cruel, and it is accompanied by a dramatic increase in antisemitism in the US, many European countries, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and other nations.

How did this happen? The initial shock and empathy for Israel in the aftermath of October 7 evaporated quickly, because Israelis fought and are fighting back — and they were not supposed to do that, they were supposed to be slaughtered like Jews have been in the past.

Their supporters have ignored every Palestinian attempt to destroy Israel and reject peace — starting in 1948 and continuing until today. They refuse to even admit that there are two sides in this conflict — and that one tries to protect civilian lives (Israel), while the other (Hamas) purposefully sets out to kill innocents.

Not only that, some American Jews are convinced that President Trump is making things worse with his actions — partly because he’s not explaining that the issue isn’t criticizing Israel, but supporting terrorism and violence. They defend Mahmoud Khalil, the arrested leader at Columbia. Their argument is that free speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment. But Khalil’s actions were not free speech — they were promotion of a terrorist group and violence against Jews.

Jacob Miller, the president of Harvard Hillel in 2023, brings up an interesting point in his article in The Harvard Crimson. He argues that many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and actions would be despicable even when one would not consider them antisemitic because of their hatred and calls for violence. This is true, but we also need to realize that any rise in antisemitism in the recent and distant past was always connected with violence, culminating in the Final Solution of the Third Reich. It is the same type of mob violence associated with the KKK and pogroms of the past.

The history of Jews shows that this hatred is usually preceded by violence; we can only hope that in America, things will unfold differently if we push back hard enough.

Jaroslava Halper, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, grew up in communist Prague, experienced the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars from a distance, but lived through Prague Spring and Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. She escaped to Canada in 1976, where she finished her MD at the University of Toronto. She trained in pathology at the Mayo Clinic, where she also obtained a PhD. She is a professor of Pathology at the University of Georgia in Athens GA. She considers it of utmost importance to defend Israel and Judaism (at least in writing), and fight antisemitism.

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